War conditions were, of course, abnormal. It was inevitable that at such a time the rewards of school life should lose their value. It was impossible to feel the old excitement about the result of a house match when the morning paper had brought with it the story of Neuve Chapelle. The winning of cups and the gaining of colours ceased to be an end in themselves. For the boy who was prevented by lack of years from joining the army in 1914 school life became a period of probation, of marking time. Life in its fullest sense was waiting for him on the other side; no prefect ever looked forward to Oxford more eagerly than those of us who were still at school in 1915 looked forward to the day when we should join the army. Our imagination was quickened by the stories told us by old boys returning from depôts and from the front. Was it possible that Smith, who had played with us only eight months earlier in the Two Cock, should be in charge of a company in the front line trenches? We fretted at our tether; our eyes were fixed on the future. We scorned the prizes that lay to our hand. We began to reconstruct our scale of values: it was not only the giants of the football field who were winning honours for themselves and for the school in France. Queer, insignificant fellows who had never risen above the Upper Fourth, and had never been in the running for a house cap, came home on leave with the blue and white riband of the military cross. We began to realise that it was not only the blood that was entitled to our respect. The blood system received a rude shock in August, 1914. It will never, unless we become involved in social revolution, receive such another. I believe, however, that it would be considerably modified were the leaving age to be altered. There would be also less hooliganism and less bullying. The third yearer would no longer be in a position of reckless freedom. Studies would still be stripped, scholars would still be ragged, but the process would be compressed. The swash-buckling element would find itself sooner in authority. The scholar would reach sooner the immunity of the Sixth. And the prefect would be no less capable of keeping order. For, after all, the prefect owes his power as much to the system that is behind him as to himself. But perhaps the greatest difference that the change would effect would be in the boy's attitude to his own life. Six years is a very long time to be in one place. I remember at the end of my first year overhearing a conversation between the barber and a boy who was leaving the next day. 'Well, Mr. Meredith,' the barber was saying, 'I suppose this is the last time I shall cut your hair. I have cut it a good many times.' 'I have been in this town,' said Meredith, 'for ten years: five years at the prep, and five years at the school. I'm jolly well sick of it.'